"Were a very conceited species. We think the universe was made for us."

"I'd say that's a pretty bold assumption. I don't think that the universe was made for me."

"Oh really? How about you tell me what you think about it all. Tell me the story of creation."

"What like Adam and Eve?"

"No, like how you believe everything came to exist right here this day."

"Ok, well we evolved from apes or something, right?"

"No, I mean the entire story, from the very beginning."

"Ok, well I guess it started with the big bang. The universe expanded and cooled. From that the earth and our solar system was made. Different chemicals on earth at the time made amino acids, which then made the ancestor of DNA. From there came singled celled life, then plants and animals, and after a few more billion years we evolved. More or less."

"And then what?"

"What do you mean? That's it."

"But you end with humans. Did the universe stop expanding 15,000 years ago when we first rose? Did evolution come to a halt after we appeared? Of course not, yet to us, our tiny insignificant existence is the summation of the universe."

"That's not what I meant at all. I was just stating facts, its not a story really."

"I don't doubt that there absolute facts, it's how they were presented. There have been thousands of creation stories over the centuries. If you were to go back and ask a Viking or a Mayan about the creation story, they might tell you how their god made the universe, or some other mythology. It wouldn't just be just be a story to them though, it would be a absolute fact that they live by, and it would end in the same way yours did, with the creation of us."

"Ok, so what's your point?"

"My point is, we may think we have it all figured out, that we are the masters of our domain and the greatest thing to ever exist, but the fact remains the universe was not created for us. We exist by random chance, the conditions were just right for life. All I'm saying is, since the universe isn't on our side, there will come a day when the conditions suitable for life will cease to exist everywhere. We are born alone, and we die alone. The universe was created without man, and it will end without him."

It was odd, he thought, that countless years of fervent innovation and development of a plethora of species has led to this reality, exactly.

The burger sizzled as it was thrown upon its uncooked side.

Take burgers. That both human taste and innovation led to a world in which a species is utilized in mass amounts to create products, one of which is placed between two pieces of refined grain with, typically, some leaves and tomato paste.

He slid the burger upon the bottom-most bun.

Why? he wondered, why did the universe manufacture such a strangely specific world? It was just one outcome, he supposed, of an ever expanding and ever moving universe. Towards what was it moving, he wondered? And why?

From a bin full of leaves, he selected a few and placed them gingerly upon the patty.

Silence floated in through the door. The man's thoughts drifted towards the inevitability of death, the inevitability of life, and towards the inevitability of inevitable things. The weak fluorescent lights of the restaurant shuddered and gave out, but the man did not notice.

He placed another bun on top of the leaves, lifted his creation and stepped towards the counter as the clock on the wall stepped towards 3:29.

"Order up," he said. "Order up," he repeated, "order 329."

He looked around and realized that there were no customers. Odd, he considered, typically there were at least a few nomads wandering the narrow expanses of the restaurant, insuring the emerging dust upon the floor never settled.

He grabbed a bag of leftovers and took it outside.

The cars had stopped, but the world had barely slowed. He walked towards the dumpster. Birds chirped in the distance.

We had been moving too fast, he knew. We all knew, in a way, but to stop so suddenly was strange. It was as if the world were a car which had just slammed into a wall. Why was he still here, then?

He approached the dumpster, forcing a squirrel to scurry away from its hiding place. He opened the lid and placed his bag inside.

Who was he now? Who had he been? Just another piston in the engine, or perhaps simply a piece of metal of which the frame consisted. Perhaps the part he had played in the speeding world he had seen had been negligible, perhaps he was only an atom of aluminum.

He walked away from the restaurant, seeing clothes lain upon the ground, a pistol buried within. He picked up the pistol.

He was not only a negligible part of his world, his world, too, was a negligible part of something so much bigger. The car, driving through a road which never ended. Only the car could stop.

He raised the gun to his head.

The world would continue, without his kind, as it had. Perhaps another like kind would emerge. Perhaps they would avoid making the same mistakes, yet they would revel in the same pleasures. Best not to keep that world waiting, he thought.

The animals near were startled by a loud noise made by man for the last time. Birds scattered, flying through the vast expanses of the sky to which we had never belonged. Small animals ran through fields and waste we had left behind. First the animals, small and large feasted upon the corpse of the last out of place man of the out of place mankind, then the bugs swallowed the remnants of his flesh, and the parasites finished clearing his skeleton of organic material to be utilized once again. Life continued.